Shane Brighton is a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of War Studies at King's College, London. His research, a philosophical discussion of military intervention, centres upon the ethics and politics of man-made mass death and 'humanitarian warfare'. Before studying philosophy he served in the British Army and has worked on the editorial team at WarReport, the journal of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. In 1999 he was appointed to the First Committee of the International Necronautical Society as Chief Philosopher.

Simon Critchley is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Essex. He is author of The Ethics of Deconstruction and Very Little...Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, and co-editor of Re-reading Levinas, Deconstructive Subjectivities, Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings and A Companion to Continental Philosophy.

Rod Dickinson is an artist whose work examines belief systems, groups and cults and conceptions of the transcendental. His crop circles have been heralded as proof of extra-terrestrial life; his current ongoing project, a set of reenactments of the Jonestown sermons and mass-suicides of 1978, has received widespread art press acclaim and popular press condemnation. He is the co-writer and programmer for two websites:Circlemakers and The Jonestown Reenactment.

Alastair Gentry is the author of two novels, Their Heads are Anonymous and Monkey Boys; three stage plays, Spines, Lucky Cows and To the East; four radio plays, The Radiators Talking, The Story of my Life in T-Shirts, The Unclear Age and Horror Head; and a generative audio installation, Nonambient. He is also the writer and programmer of two websites: 100 Black Boxes, which is inspired by flight recorders of crashed planes, and The Nothings, a modular novel named for the first decade of the 21st Century.

Nandita Ghose is a writer and director who has worked extensively in theatre, radio and T.V. Her stage plays include Ishtar Descends (winner of the Second Wave Young Women Writers award) The Magic Stone and Bhangra Girls, which was made into a television film. Her radio plays include Hanuman's Child and Shakti, a dramatisation for radio of Vikram Chandra's novella.

Margarita Gluzberg is an artist whose work deals with matter - animate and otherwise - in states of transformation. Over the last three years she has produced a series of large drawings whose hybrid subjects hover between fashion items, imperfectly formed creatures and deviant geometrical configurations. She has recently exhibited at Richard Salmon Gallery in London, Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh and Elsinore Castle in Denmark.

Alexander Hamilton is an artist and printmaker whose work shows a preoccupation with the mapping of invisible landscapes, or the transposition of actual landscapes into alienated, figural ones. His work has been exhibited in the Australian National University Gallery in Canberra, the Alpha Jetz Gallery in Stuttgart and the British Council in Prague. In 1999 he was appointed to the First Committee of the International Necronautical Society as Chief Cartographer.

Sally Hampson is an artist. While her background is in textiles, her current ongoing project consists of the reconstruction of the life and journeys of early-to-mid twentieth century anthropologist Kitty Lake. These reconstructions have been exhibited at the British Council in Cairo, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Horniman Museum in London and, most recently, Egg Gallery, London.

Stewart Home is the author of several novels including Pure Mania, No Pity and Slow Death, and works of non-fiction such as Art Strike Papers, Neoist Manifestos and What is Situationism?. A historian of the avant-garde as well as a relentless cultural agitator, he had been called by The Modern Review 'the art terrorist's art terrorist'.

Rut Blees Luxemburg is a photographer whose work recasts dead space as psychic entry points into the city, memory and desire. Her recent collection, Liebeslied/My Suicides, a collaboration with the philosopher Alexander Garcia Duttman, is published by Black Dog Publishing, London.

Melissa McCarthy is a postgraduate student in Urban Studies at King's College, London. She was appointed to the First Committee of the International Necronautical Society in 1999 as Chief Obituary Reviewer. Over the last few months she has been researching the relationship between surfers and death, and will attend the Office to report her findings on this subject.

Luke McKeown is an artist who uses painting, writing, installation and performance. In 1986 he co-founded the CLOCK live art group, who went on to create more than fifty installations in venues as diverse as swimming pools and castles. His solo works often subject his own body to feats of extreme duration. These include Voyage of Timely Consumption or (The Significance of Thinking) and Voyage of the Unrealists - Compass Ship (Site-ations International AP, Cardiff), Suspension (Bridge) (Cardiff Art in Time Festival), Burial Ground (Artist's Museum, Lodz), Grey Suit (Serpentine Gallery, London) and Dead End (Rack Gallery, London). His film Fridge will be screened during the INS residency.

Momentary Fusion is an aerial dance-theatre company based on the collaboration of anti-gravity artists Sophy Griffiths and Isabel Rocamora. The driving premise for the work is the body's subversion of gravitational pull. Their creations take place site-specifically, in a theatre environment and on screen and have included X-Slings (Swischenzeit Festival, Austria), Dialogue Between Nun and Arch (Grec Festival, Barcelona) and an untitled performance to mark the launch of the Royal Mail's In Commemoration of Artists stamp (Tate Modern, London).

Matt Parker is a playwrite. His Celaine, performed at the Hampstead Theatre in 1999, deals with the landscapes, both actual and imaginary, inhabited by a dying young woman and her family. His recent radio play Timbuktu examines the relationship between knowledge, modernity and oblivion.

Paul Perry is a conceptual artist whose work shows a preoccupation with the limits of the human and how these might be surpassed. In 1997 he collaborated with scientists at the University of Maastricht, mixing his own genes with those of a laboratory mouse to produce a new, genetically viable sequence (Good and Evil in the Long Voyage). In 2000 he directed the first episode of a multi-part film on the simulation of Near Death Experiences (1000 Deaths, Sortie 1).

Ricky Seabra is an artist and designer. He has worked for Miramax Films, helping create posters for Pulp Fiction and The Piano, and collaborated with choreographers in Holland, where he lives, and his native Brazil. Enthusiastic about the possibility of inhabiting unusual spaces, he has lectured at space industry conferences and universities on lunar architecture and the potential advantages of including artists in the International Space Station venture.

Will Self is a novelist. His books include The Quantity Theory of Insanity, My Idea of Fun, Grey Area, Junk Mail and The Sweet Smell of Psychosis. His latest novel, How the Dead Live, presents a necropian London through which the souls of the dead wander as they await reincarnation.

Mark Aerial Waller is a film maker whose playfully satirical work is set in the decaying ruins of twentieth century dreams: nuclear factories, ships returning from scientific missions, urban ghettos. His latest film, Sons of Temperance, in which members of an obscure underground organisation distribute illicit 'crystal refraction recordings', will be screened during the INS residency.